Raible Designs

[TSE] The Holy Grails of Web Frameworks with Guillaume LaForge

Under the hood, Grails uses Spring MVC. It has support for "flash scope" between requests.

I find it funny that flash scope is so popular these days, we've had this in AppFuse for four years. However, web frameworks didn't add native support for it until it had a name (provided by Rails). To be fair to Struts Classic, they had support for it before Rails was even invented.

Rather than JSPs, Grails uses Grails Server Pages, which look much like JSPs. Grails uses SiteMesh by default and allows you to easily change the layout used with a meta tag.

<meta name="layout" content="main"/>

Most of the dynamic attributes in a GSP are rendered using the various "g" tags. There's dynamic taglibs for logic (if, else, elseif), iterating, linking, ajax (remoteFunction, remoteLink, formRemote, submitToRemote), form (select, currencySelect, localeSelect, datePicker, checkBox), rendering (render*, layout*, paginate), validation (eachError, hasError, message) and UI (i.e. richtexteditor). [Read More]

[TSE] Good ol' I-95

I left West Palm Beach at 11:30 this morning, seemingly plenty of time in order to make the afternoon sessions at The Spring Experience. Unfortunately, a truck caught on fire on the side of the freeway and stopped traffic for a good hour. So it took me two hours to get here. Damn. I just walked into Guillaume LaForge's talk on Grails, hopefully I can learn something in the last 30 minutes of his presentation.

Update: It looks like I missed a good talk on testing this morning.

Selenium Plugin for Maven

On the Maven users mailing list, Mick Knutson recently posted a question asking if there's a Maven 2 plugin for Selenium. Since we're hoping to move from Canoo WebTest to Selenium for AppFuse, this piqued my interest. It looks like the Geronimo guys have created a plugin and they run their Selenium tests from TestNG. While another user agrees, Wendy Smoak recommends following what Shale does.

While these solutions sound doable, David Santiago Turiño seems to suggest the best solution: Mavenium. The main limitation of Mavenium seems to be it only supports HTML-based tests. Since I expect most AppFuse users to generate their tests using the Selenium IDE, I doubt this will be an issue.

Is anyone using this plugin? If so, do you think it's the best way to integrate Selenium into AppFuse? We'd like to implement the most popular and easiest to use mechanism.

[TSE] Designing Stateful Web Application Control Flow with Erwin Vervaet

Spring Web Flow (SWF) does not fit into an application or a feature where free-flow navigation is required. It works best where you need to lock down and control navigation. SWF is not designed to be a web framework, but rather to solve the specific problem of navigation and state management between many pages.

Erwin is a Senior consultant at Ervacon and has extensive experience using Java SE and Java EE. He is the inventor and co-lead of the Spring Web Flow project.[Read More]

[TSE] Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge

Spring 2.0 has dynamic language support. To make it work, you do need a Java interface as a contract between callers and dynamic beans. There's no special requirements on the interface. It's a "POJI" and doesn't have to extend or implement anything. For example:

There's 3 ways of configuring Groovy beans:

1. GroovyScriptFactory <bean> element defining source location and properties
2. <lang:groovy> element from a <lang> namespace
3. POBD (Plain old <bean> definition) - this is unique for Groovy since it can be compiled into Java bytecode

[Read More]

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[Read More]

[TSE] Domain Driven Design with Eric Evans

I've arrived at The Spring Experience, 45 minutes late for the first talk. I tried to get up early, but decided I'd rather get 6 hours of sleep instead of 4. I'm now sitting in Eric Evans' Introduction to Domain-Driven Design talk and the room is packed. I've never seen Eric talk before, but he seems a bit unprepared. His PowerPoint presentation is not in full-screen mode, so you can see where he hasn't finished slides and such. He's also very soft-spoken and seems to have an interesting way of convincing the audience his ideas are good. I feel like I'm sitting in some sort of NPR Seminar.[Read More]

Florida Bound

I'm getting ready to hop on a plane at the Boise airport. I'll be stopping in Denver to pick up our puppy and then flying to Ft. Lauderdale to attend The Spring Experience conference. Should be a fun weekend. I'll be staying on Singer Island, which sounds pretty nice after being in cold Idaho all week.

Update: It doesn't look like I'm going to make Rod's Keynote tonight. Hopefully someone else will blog it.

In Boise, heading to Florida on Thursday

This week, I'm in Boise, Idaho teaching a Spring Fundamentals course. It's cold here, just like it is in Denver this week.

I'm heading out early Thursday morning (Country Bry is teaching a Hibernate class that day) for The Spring Experience in Florida.

I'll be staying with Julie's Mom in West Palm Beach, so hopefully the commute to the show won't be too bad. My AppFuse session is on Saturday night, but I'm expecting a light showing after Terracotta's recent announcement. Jonas Bonér is doing a session at the same time as mine. Maybe if I bring a bunch of beer, I can still draw a crowd.

Vacation in Denver

This afternoon, Julie and I are heading downtown to checkin to The Westin Tabor Center. Tonight is my company's Holiday Party and we figured it was a good excuse to spend the night out. James Goodwill turned me on to the idea about a year ago. The idea is to take your spouse "on vacation" in the town you live in. It's quite cool, because you rarely get a chance to enjoy the town you live in. We're only doing one night, but Jim recommends you do 2 or 3. The last time we did a vacation in Denver, it was our anniversary and we had a blast.

For the party tonight, we'll be dining at La Fondue, with the Parade of Lights just happens to pass in front of. After that, we'll all be heading to Denverginity. It should definitely be a fun night!